Dronethusiast Interviews Raphael “Trappy” Pirker

(Source: dronethusiast.com)  

A somewhat unexpected NTSB appeals board ruling was announced last week, not long after an FAA official commented that ruling on drone flights should be expected by the end of the year. Today, further speculation emerged in a post by Marketwatch citing a Wall Street Journal article that expects that the “looming rule proposal would restrict commercial uses, require pilot license”.

According to the WSJ article referring to “people familiar with the rule-making process”, the FAA plans to group all drones weighing less than 55 pounds under one set of rules. That would dash hopes for looser rules on the smallest drones, such as the 2.8-pound Phantom line of camera-equipped, four-rotor helicopters made by China’s SZ DJI Technology Co. Similar-sized devices are seen as the most commercially viable drones and have surged in popularity in the last two years.

After the NTSB ruling, we have covered the story and went on to try to provide some background information on Trappy. Unsurprisingly, the comments on our posts here on the site and in social platforms have been extremely polarized. Some of you thought that Trappy is a hero and he is fighting his case for the entire drone community. Others saw Pirker as the main reason of the controversy and the looming fear that our hobby could be outright banned. So we reached out to Trappy and asked for an exclusive interview to hear his side of the story. We wanted to ask you all the questions we thought you guys had on your mind and also wanted to clear up claims that emerged in the posts.

Dronethusiat (DT): Reading the comments by people in social platforms and our sight, we see that some people think you that you are a hero fighting for their rights to fly, while others are on the opinion that you are doing everything to ruin their hobby. What are your thoughts on this?

Trappy: It’s pretty troubling to see that people take the stands of defending the FAA in this case and kind of try to blame TBS (Team Black Sheep, Trappy’s company) for stirring the pot. All of the legal frameworks that were used to fine me were put in place way before TBS even existed, before we even flew FPV. The policy statements that they are using to fine us were written in to 2007, so and the first FPV flight happened somewhere around late 2008. I don’t know, but it just took the FAA to find somebody that they wanted to fine and there isn’t any new kind of law that was created as a reaction to any of our flights.

DT: Maybe this was just the right time for them being able to find the right scapegoat or in this case a “scapesheep” :).

Trappy: Yeah, we were at the forefront of the whole FPV movement, so any heat that was going to come towards FPV was going towards us. And this happened in many instances and in many countries as well. We kind of became legal test cases and in the US, we just thought that the allegations were ridiculous enough to justify defense and we defended against them pretty successfully in the first instance. Now we’ve lost on the appeal, but what people need to understand is we’ve just now gotten to the point that the actual fine can be discussed. Our initial defense was that we tried to get the entire case thrown out by the merits of the law, based on that there were no existing laws in place to actually fine any drone operator. This has been overturned by the NTSB ruling, so now this case going to go into a court where we are actually going to discuss how reckless the flight was and what fine would be justified for it.

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